SIGH I would say that words fail me, but it is my understanding that treating servants in that way is not unusual in the country of origin of those rich people. My personal feelings are that I would like to hang the aforesaid rich people by their figgin, but that’s another matter.
However… There is one thing that is very clear to me: Don’t tell me that the directive of the hotel didn’t know what was going on! That is the ONE thing that I am NOT going to believe.
Just to add that the two reports have some slight differences (the biggest one being that one newspaper talks of 15 people, and the other of 17), but that the basic story is consistent throughout the whole array of sources I’ve been reading.
You haven’t submitted anything for debate; what are we debating here? Your OP is basically just chit-chat about the incident. Well-constructed, but as it stands, more MPSIMS or Pit material.
The title presents a debate: what constitutes slavery in today’s world? The people involved were not owned in a traditional sense. They could not be sold to others as property. But they were working under coercion. Does slavery require the ability to be sold? Apparently not, today’s slaves are defined by physical threats and/or physical bondage. But is an implied threat, coupled with poor working conditions and extremely low or no pay sufficient to define slavery?
Is it true as has been claimed that over 27 million are slaves today and that the price in real dollars for a slave has never been less?
It doesn’t sound like they were ‘owned’ so to speak, but they were apparantly being kept there against their will. I would call it slavery or at the very least kidnapping.
So to make this a debate … is a prostitute who is kept working by an abusive pimp who threatens her with violence if she leaves him (and is therefore not free to leave) a slave?
That may be correct today, but historically? Servitude and slavery have different definitions for every time and place they exist, and the line between wasn’t always that clear… You had racial-base American slavery, biblical-type slavery,indentured servitude, serfs/bondservents, thralls, Jannissaries… the list goes on.
Right - that’s why in much of the world the prohibition adopted is one on “slavery or involuntary servitude”. Because *“chattel” slavery * is, if anything, the easiest form of bondage to identify and curtail. The reality is that throughout human history, the norm has been for some people to be in bondage to others who consider themselves entitled to be masters, if not by property right of purchase then by right of conquest or of bloodline. (And there will always be those who say, if the only choice to escape bondage is death, well too bad, you should choose the death… easy to say from the other side)
The big distinction is that some of these people were able to escape to the police, who then came in and freed the rest. If they had truly been slaves, the police would have brought them back to their legal owners.
I think there’s a distinction between being held as a captive and being held as a slave. Being a slave is worse because you’re essentially being held by the entire country not just your captors.
There’s a lot of possible definitions of what a slave is. PETA, for example, claim that cats and dogs are slaves. But I think the most widely accepted definition of a slave is a person who is owned by another person.
If you disagree, what do you feel the defining characteristics of slavery are?